«leftbraned

I’ve been using Cygwin on my Windows partition to run a particular job every minute. Cron (Vixie’s cron) works perfectly, except that messages like this one were appearing (every minute!) in my Windows event log:

The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( /usr/sbin/cron ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: /usr/sbin/cron: PID 3248: (ron) CMD (/usr/bin/getmail -q).

This Microsoft KB Bulletin helps explain what the message means generally, but doesn’t help solve it in this case.

So, on a hunch, I started syslogd (which I had installed but never run), restarted cron, et voilà, problem solved.

Now, cron’s informational messages appear /var/log/messages, as they should, and the Windows Event Viewer–bless its little heart–has stopped whining.

(Note: I used syslogd from the Net/inetutils Cygwin package, but syslog-ng from Admin/syslog-ng also seems to solve the problem.)

Here’s a transcript that summarizes how I solved the problem:

14:04:20 !598 ~>cygcheck -cd | grep inetutils
inetutils               1.5-4
14:04:22 !598 ~>syslogd-config
*** Query: Overwrite existing /etc/syslog.conf file? (yes/no) yes
*** Info: Creating default /etc/syslog.conf file

*** Warning: The following function requires administrator privileges!
*** Query: Do you want to install syslogd as service? (yes/no) yes

*** Info: The syslogd service has been installed under the LocalSystem
*** Info: account (also known as SYSTEM). To start the service now, call
*** Info: `net start syslogd' or `cygrunsrv -S syslogd'. Otherwise, it
*** Info: will start automatically after the next reboot.

*** Info: Check /etc/syslog.conf first, if it suits your needs.

*** Info: Keep in mind that any file mentioned in /etc/syslog.conf
*** Info: must exist and be readable and writable for the SYSTEM account.
*** Info: Oh and, use tabs, not spaces in /etc/syslog.conf...

Configuration finished. Have fun!
14:04:32 !599 ~>cygrunsrv --start syslogd
14:05:04 !600 ~>cygrunsrv --stop cron
14:05:12 !601 ~>cygrunsrv --start cron
14:06:02 !602 ~>tail /var/log/messages
Aug 30 14:05:03 blake syslogd: PID 6048: `syslogd' service started
Aug 30 14:05:14 blake /usr/sbin/cron: PID 1596: (CRON) STARTUP (V5.0)
Aug 30 14:05:15 blake cron: PID 1100: `cron' service started
Aug 30 14:06:01 blake /usr/sbin/cron: PID 5792: (ron) CMD (/usr/bin/getmail -q)